About the AuthorWoody Leonhard

Microsoft released its Patch Tuesday passel a couple of hours ago, and it looks like we can all go home and enjoy some eggnog. There were two fixed vulnerabilities for Win7, and two for Win 8.1, and the (five) supported Win10 versions had three fixe…

It’s time to make sure your computer is locked down. If history is any indication, we’re going to be in for a rocky ride over the next week or two.In September, folks who were set to update Windows automatically were greeted by Word docs and Excel s…

Many malware researchers were surprised to find an unexpected patch on their machines yesterday. It didn’t arrive through the front door — Windows Update wasn’t involved. Instead, the new version of mpengine.dll arrived automatically, around the bac…

Reports are piling in from afar that Windows Update in Win7 is broken. My first sighting was late Sunday afternoon, when KarenS posted on the AskWoody Lounge:
When I clicked on the Windows Update icon today to start the updates it said that my compu…

Hundreds of millions of downloads just doesn’t cut it, apparently. Ivo Beltchev, who first released the Start Menu replacement in 2009, has decided it just isn’t worth the effort any more. Yesterday he posted this on his official web blog:
After mon…

Throughout history, there have been a million reasons why Internet Explorer won’t start: You click on the icon in the taskbar, and nothing happens. Thanks to some stellar sleuthing by @PKCano on AskWoody, it now appears that there’s an identifiable …

The list of complaints about this month’s patches goes on forever. I covered the high points a couple of days ago. We’ve seen people who are running Win10 Creators Update and who specifically said they didn’t want to upgrade to Fall Creators Update …

There are so many issues with this month’s security patches that it’s hard to decide where to begin. Let’s start with the problems that have been acknowledged, then move into the realm of what’s not yet fully defined.
[ Further reading: Patch alert:…

Hard to imagine in this age of privacy scandals, but HP is installing a telemetry client on its customers’ computers — and it isn’t offering any warning, or asking permission, before delivering the payload.Dubbed “HP Touchpoint Analytics Service,” H…

For those of us keeping track of Windows patches, the long four-day weekend in the U.S. felt like another instantiation of Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. Here are the developments, in more or less chronological (which is to say, not logical at all) order.Whi…

I’m not vouching for Microsoft, mind you, but if the latest official assertion about the Surface Book 2 battery is true, it’s a game changer.

Since the dawn of Surface time, there’s been no way to have a battery replaced: Your only option was to swap out the entire unit, an expensive proposition. A recent post by a Microsoft employee on the official Microsoft Answers Forum raises a glimmer of hope that batteries in the Surface Book 2 can be replaced.

Surface owners have complained about short-lived batteries and their expensive replacements going all the way back to the original Surface and Surface Pro. Way back in February 2013, poster Hyperlexis described his interaction about a bad Surface Pro battery with a Microsoft Surface rep:

The patches have been out for only a few days, but as best I as can tell at this early juncture, November’s Patch Tuesday bugs aren’t as bad as they were in October. Thank Redmond.

If you use an Epson dot matrix printer, if you’re seeing an error that CDPUserSvc has stopped working, or if you were forcibly upgraded from Win10 Creators Update, version 1703, to Fall Creators Update, version 1709, I have some good news and some bad news.

Dot matrix dissed

Microsoft has acknowledged a bug in its Patch Tuesday updates that causes “some Epson SIDM and Dot Matrix printers” to fail. The bug appears in this month’s patches for everyversion of Windows:

Another massive outpouring of Microsoft patches yesterday — more than 1,100 separate patches — brought a few surprises and shouts of indignation from a forced but unannounced upgrade. Some bugs are already evident, and there’s a storm brewing over one Office patch. But by and large, if you don’t use Internet Explorer or Edge, it’s a non-event.

Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar Surface brand has taken many hits in its relatively short and sordid career, while customer support vacillated between inadequate and non-existent. Now, official posts on the Microsoft Answers Forum lend a ray of hope to those who have specific problems. It remains to be seen if the posts reflect a corporate change of heart, or if they’re just more of the same-old same-old.

Last week I wrote about the apparent bug in the Win10 Fall Creators Update that makes some Surface Pens stop writing. In that article I list 10 separate Answers Forum threads and two Reddit threads, packed with complaints from similarly afflicted customers.

If Windows Defender is enabled and registered for IOfficeAntivirus scanning, Office applications still run registry key scanning first instead of using Windows Defender for documents scanning. After you install this update, Office applications will use Windows Defender instead.

Last month we had no end of problems with Microsoft’s Windows and Office patches. If your machine was attached to a corporate Windows Update server, and your admin approved Windows patches for immediate distribution, your PC may have joined a sea of blue screens. There were lots and lots of additional gotchas.

As I reported last week, Microsoft released a handful of buggy patches designed to fix the “Unexpected error from external database driver” bug introduced by all of the October Windows security patches. As noted then, the bug fixes have bugs themselves, and the cure is worse than the disease.

Now comes word that Microsoft has not only yanked the bad patches; it’s also deleted the KB articles associated with the patches.

Specifically, all of these KB articles report that the page does not exist:

I have a Surface Pro 4, for which I’ve had a Surface Pen. My pen, however, has been malfunctioning. In essence, it stops writing. I can still use the buttons and my screen responds to touch, my keyboard still works, etc., but my pen simply will not write. Most puzzling, this problem comes and goes seemingly at random. The pen will be completely nonfunctional for hours at a time and then, without warning, will write flawlessly again. I’ve tried every troubleshooting tip to no avail, and have even replaced the battery. Replacing the battery helped briefly, but the problem has persisted. I went back again and tried the troubleshooting tips, but they haven’t stuck. As someone who bought this tablet to help me with my digital art, it’s really unhelpful to have a malfunctioning pen.

Yesterday, Thursday, a date which will live in infamy, Microsoft unleashed patches for five versions of Windows. They were supposed to fix the widely reported bug in all of the mainstream October Windows security patches that gave rise to a bogus “Unexpected error from external database driver” message.

It’s too early to assess all of the damage, but reports from many corners say installing these new patches brings back old, unpatched versions of many files. If you installed one of the patches from yesterday, best to uninstall it. Now.

Microsoft’s ongoing record of shoddy response to Surface Pro problems continues unabated. This time, the Surface Pro 4 (born October 2015, superseded June 2017) takes the limelight: Complaints about shaky screens and dead Type Covers abound.

We’re seeing a repeat of the all-too-familiar pattern of Surface denial, aided and abetted by clueless, paid, outsourced support personnel on the Microsoft Answers forum.

One of the best known nudge-nudge-wink-wink features of Windows 7 and 8.1 is about to fade into the sunset. As of Dec. 31, the offer to upgrade from either version of Windows to Win10 for free will end. At least, it looks like the offer will end. With no clear announcement from Microsoft, the nods and winks seem more furtive than ever.

At the core of the conundrum: Microsoft has officially permitted “genuine” Windows 7 and 8.1 machines to upgrade to Win10 for free, long after the original free upgrade program expired on July 29, 2016. The trick? You had to verify by asserting, “Yes, I use assistive technologies.”

Those of us who have to keep Windows 10 working have hit yet another rough course. This month’s patches haven’t been pretty. In fact, if your admin set the WSUS or SCCM update servers to automatically approve Windows 10 updates, you may have had to deal with oceans of blue screens.

Right now, the biggest threat is not KRACK – Computerworld‘s Gregg Keizer has an overview here and the Krackattacks.com site has the latest details; it hasn’t (yet) started infecting normal Windows users. The big threat now is from that Wacky Wascal BadRabbit, which started with a fake Flash update on a Russian site and an ancient DDEAUTO field exploit in Word (and Excel and Outlook and OneNote) and is being used to carry Locky and other ransomware.

A week ago today, Microsoft rolled out the “RTM” build of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update (FCU), version 1709, build 16299.15 – which should’ve been immediately upgraded to 16299.19. At least anecdotally, the initial push brought in far more Win10 machines than any previous rollout. I’ve seen few reports of problems from those who had FCU thrust upon them, but there are plenty of problems among those who installed the upgrade manually.

Windows 10 has been out for more than two years and, while it hasn’t caught on like wildfire, it’s certainly left lots of head scratching. As we barrel down the two-versions-per-year slalom slide, you’re going to need a cool head – and some cooler facts – to keep it going.

I’m seeing many reports, in various locations, about this month’s Windows security patches breaking custom programs that import and export Excel XLS files. Programs that have worked for years are suddenly, mysteriously, turning belly-up. The most common symptom is an error message that says “Unexpected error from external database driver” followed by a number.

Some people want to install the latest version of Windows 10 the moment it’s available. They’ll line up — intentionally or not — to participate in a beta testing cycle that’s disguised as a four-month-or-so exercise, designed to winnow the last bugs out of the new version before it’s deemed ready for corporate use.

If you want to help beta test an unpolished version of Win10, you don’t need to do a thing. Microsoft plans to release Fall Creators Update on Oct. 17 and will roll it out over your machine when the company figures it’s fit.

On the other hand, you might want to consider waiting until any initial problems get ironed out, keeping Win10 Fall Creators Update off your machine until you’re ready for it. Blocking the update isn’t easy, in many cases. But if you’re persistent, you can do it.

We’re sitting at PT+2 — two days after Patch Tuesday — and the problems continue to roll in. Here are the latest mug shots in a rapidly devolving rogue’s gallery.

If you’ve been following along, you know about the initial problems I reported on Tuesday — the Word zero-day, TPM patches that don’t patch, known and acknowledged bugs in Windows patches. You saw the late bloomers I reported on Wednesday — delayed, failed and rolled back Windows patches, a non-existent Flash update, confusingly no .NET security patches, an incorrect description of the CVE-2017-11776 fix, and more TPM follies.

This month’s massive bundle of Patch Tuesday patches almost certainly contains more than a few surprises, and they’re only starting to surface. Here’s a rundown of what I’ve seen in the wee hours of Wednesday morning.

There are lots of reports of delayed, failed and rolled back installations of KB 4041676, the Win10 Creators Update (version 1703) monthly cumulative update, which brings 1703 up to build 15063.674. A quick glance at the KB article confirms that there are dozens and dozens of fixes in this cumulative update — a remarkable state of affairs, considering the Fall Creators Update, version 1709, is due on Oct. 17.

Windows 10 has been out for more than two years and, while it hasn’t caught on like wildfire, it’s certainly left lots of head scratching. As we barrel down the two-versions-per-year slalom slide, you’re going to need a cool head – and some cooler facts – to keep it going.

The cumulative update for Win10 Creators Update, version 1703 — which sports dozens of fixes — has a couple of problems: Systems with support enabled for USB Type-C Connector System Software Interface (UCSI) may experience a blue screen or stop responding with a black screen when a system shutdown is initiated, and it may change Czech and Arabic languages to English for Microsoft Edge and other applications.